During the first winter break of my graduate school career, I left campus for more than a month. When I returned, I discovered that all of my mail had been removed from my mailbox and had been returned to the senders courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.

The typical perspective a graduate student is someone who is hungry, poor, and hungry. Holed up in the library, or trapped in a lab into the wee hours of the night, the helpless graduate student is at the mercy of his or her tyrannical advisor and can be spotted across campuses with large Ziploc bags […]